Rhythm Of Life

Young Dancers Move Their Bodies And Build Their Futures To The Steady Beat Of A Dream.

June 26, 2004|By Diane Hubbard Burns, Sentinel Dance Critic

The Orlando School of Cultural Dance is like a rich dessert wrapped in plain tinfoil. Outside, it is an aging, windowless warehouse in the shadow of the East-West Expressway, but inside, it is a world of refinement.

Two long, narrow studios resound with activity. Trills of Baroque music emanate from one as young dancers put on pointe shoes and face the mirror.

Some of the ballet students have a hard time tearing themselves away from the doorway of the other studio -- the one vibrating with the thunder of six African drums.

There, 11 girls rehearse a West African dance for this Sunday's Cultural Dance Extravaganza at Carr Performing Arts Centre. Three boys on a raised platform pound out a rhythm that demands to be obeyed. The girls move their arms in fluid, balletic circles, but ballerinas never get to pulse their pelvises and shoulders like this.

"Wow," says Julie Coleman, leading her students through steps for the lamban, a court dance from the Senegal-Mali region.

"Wow-wow," they reply in a call-and-response of common purpose.

The faces at this Pine Hills school are a mirror image of what you see at most dance studios. Here, black students are by far the majority, and that's the point.

"I want to touch the lives of African-Americans in this area," says Coleman, the school's 43-year-old director.

In the words of Linda Grafal, who directs the school's ballet program, "We're here to make kids. That's our business -- to build them up."

FILLING A VOID

For 14 years, since Coleman first rented a College Park studio for weekly African dance classes, her school has been a cultural oasis in Orlando's African-American community.

"We need much more of her," says Martha R. Brown, a community activist whose path intersected Coleman's in the 1980s, when they served as neighborhood liaisons to then-Mayor Bill Frederick.

"The community said there's not a lot for our kids to do -- especially in the urban areas," Brown says. Coleman opened her school in Pine Hills 11 years ago to help fill that void.

Sunday evening, about 60 students will celebrate their accomplishments in the annual Cultural Dance Extravaganza at Carr. The performance of ballet and modern dance, African dance and drumming, singing, hip-hop and tae kwon do is a far cry from Coleman's early, focused experience studying ballet in her native London.

She continued studying, after her family moved to the United States, at New York's High School for the Performing Arts, the Alvin Ailey school and Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre of Harlem, eventually joining the apprentice company at Dance Theatre of Harlem.

It is Mitchell's vision, which took kids from crime-ridden New York neighborhoods and molded them into a renowned, largely black ballet company, that she'd like to emulate.

"I want to have Central Florida's first black, classical ballet company," she says.

But that goal is a long way off -- way out beyond having her own building and drumming up more reliable funding for the 30 percent to 40 percent of her students who attend classes free or at reduced fees. Right now, her school is as much a community center as a dance studio, with after-school programs that bring kids in two vans from elementary schools (Coleman drives one herself) and a summer day camp.

Ronita M. Sanders, Orlando area director for U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown of Jacksonville, has volunteered at the school and attended its performances.

"So many working-class families don't have the opportunity to get involved in those types of activities," she says. "Julie finds scholarships and grants" so that kids can participate.

And she becomes a second mother to many of her students.

"It's an environment of learning," says Victoria Thompson, whose son and daughter attend the school and do their homework there until mom picks them up after work. "Nobody has idle time with Miss Julie. You could be reading, you could be practicing your dance, you could be practicing your drumming."

ALLURE OF AFRICAN DANCE

When Coleman moved to Orlando in the early 1980s, she found "a lot of African-American kids weren't exposed to the arts and the discipline of dance." Ballet wasn't the ticket to bring them in the door, so she latched onto African dance to draw students and encourage an appreciation of cultural history.

Coleman studied African and Caribbean dance forms in New York and has twice visited Western Africa -- once with Chuck Davis, the dean of African dance in America -- to learn its history and forms.

Students "realize African-Americans have contributed so many things to the world. They say, `Wow, I'm a part of that.' "

CHANGING LIVES

Coleman believes that love of dance can change the trajectory of young people's lives, and one need look no further than the head-over-heels involvement of Tiffany Vargas to see why.